Departing Google chief scientist Jeff Dean has been in talks for a $10 billion valuation for his new AI startup

Aug 13, 2026 07:31 AM - 5 hours ago 1

Google's erstwhile main intelligence Jeff Dean

Jeff Dean spent 27 years helping build Google. Now, investors could beryllium betting $1 cardinal that he tin build the adjacent large point successful AI extracurricular it.

The legendary Google technologist has been successful discussions for $1 cardinal successful financing astatine a valuation of astir $10 cardinal for his caller AI startup, Discovery Loop, group acquainted pinch the matter told Business Insider.

Discovery Loop has been 1 of the astir talked-about startups successful Silicon Valley complete the past week, aft Dean, regarded astatine Google arsenic a legend, announced his departure.

Details of the information could change. A typical for Dean declined to comment.

While he has not publically shared fundraising details, Dean has been unfastened astir the extremity of the startup, Discovery Loop, describing it connected X arsenic a nationalist use corp "whose ngo is to automate instrumentality learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress."

The institution hopes to tackle immoderate of subject and engineering's hardest problems done the "parallel execution of thousands of experiments."

A Discovery Loop property merchandise from August 5 said that the company's first backing information is being led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, pinch information from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital. Alphabet is simply a founding investor and unreality partner, according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Discovery Loop's different founders bring decades of acquisition building immoderate of Google's astir important products.

Sanjay Ghemawat, a longtime collaborator of Dean who joined Google successful 1999, helped create foundational distributed-computing technologies. Quoc Le, a founding personnel of Google Brain, became a salient interrogator successful heavy learning and large-scale neural networks, contributing to advances successful connection models and different instauration models. Oriol Vinyals, meanwhile, was a starring interrogator astatine Google DeepMind whose activity spans series modeling and reinforcement learning.

Dean shared a transportation platform connected X that 1 erstwhile Google merchandise leader called "one of the astir stacked transportation decks ever made."

One descent lists products the founding squad worked on, including Google Search, Ads, Gemini, and Gmail. Another descent focuses connected world credentials, showing Google Scholar rankings placing Dean, Le, and Vinyals among the astir highly cited AI researchers.

Discovery Loop's squad is the latest illustration of Google talent leaving the institution to raise immense sums for caller AI startups.

Former DeepMind interrogator David Silver raised $1.1 cardinal this twelvemonth astatine a $5.1 cardinal valuation for Ineffable Intelligence, his caller laboratory focused connected building AI that learns from experience, while erstwhile DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou reportedly raised astatine a $25 cardinal pre-money valuation for Reflection AI.

Periodic Labs, cofounded by erstwhile Google Brain interrogator Ekin Dogus Cubuk and erstwhile OpenAI interrogator Liam Fedus, has raised hundreds of millions, while Sakana AI, cofounded by erstwhile Google researchers Llion Jones and David Ha, was weighted astatine $2.65 cardinal past year.

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Here is simply a small much astir me: Previously, I was a elder newsman astatine LAist/Southern California Public Radio, wherever I covered business and economics. I person besides written for The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review and was a reporting intern astatine The Times. I started my profession arsenic a shaper for NPR's Morning Edition and besides produced award-winning documentaries for nationalist television.I spent the 2017-2018 world twelvemonth astatine Columbia Business School arsenic a Knight-Bagehot fellow. After that, I oversaw the improvement of The Journal, a regular podcast produced by The Wall Street Journal and Gimlet Media.Originally from Seattle, I graduated cum laude from Occidental College successful Los Angeles pinch a grade successful politics.In my free time, I emotion skiing, tennis, and poker. I competed successful the 2024 World Series of Poker Main Event but sadly did not win.